Staring
by Ava Blook
Summary: After an accident with his parents' experimental End Portal leaves Danny half-Enderman, he has to get control of his powers and figure out how human he really is. A series of oneshots. Rated T for violence, injury, blood, etc. in later chapters.
1. Staring

**Yep, I really don't know what the word 'hiatus' means, do I? Well, I'm sick, so I figure I should get some leeway.**

**Anyway, this fanfic is based on a really awesome crossover/AU idea ****by Tumblr user zilleniose, which I will provide the link to in my profile as FFN for some reason doesn't want me to put links in chapters. Anyways, it's basically Danny Phantom in the world of Minecraft, with a few changes. End Portal instead of Ghost Portal, half-Enderman instead of half-ghost, and you get the gist. I thought it was a really cool idea and was surprised that no one else had written for it yet (as far as I can tell - so far it doesn't seem to have a unique AU name), so I wrote a quick and probably sucky oneshot. I'd love to write a longer story about this, but that will have to wait until I'm not juggling like five other fanfic ideas at once.**

**Also, this is my first attempt at a oneshot. Please let me know how it turned out.**

**I don't own Danny Phantom. I don't own Minecraft. I don't even own the idea of this crossover. Don't sue me.**

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Description: After an accident with his parents' End Portal, Danny tries to resume normal life and return to school. Of course, that's more easily said than done given that he's now half-Enderman.

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Staring

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It had been a week since the portal accident.

A week since Danny had stumbled into his parents' prototype portal to the End, the dimension where the Endermen supposedly came from.

A week since the portal had turned on with Danny still inside.

A week since he'd fused with an Enderman on the other side, becoming something less (and more) than human.

And a week was not enough time for him to feel ready to go to school again.

Still, here he was, outside the doors of Casper Mining Academy, preparing to go in.

There had been no way around it. The physical injuries had all healed. He couldn't convince his parents to let him stay home unless he told them about the other things that had happened to him, the ones that hadn't faded away like the cuts and burns had. About the way his eyes changed colors, and he sometimes teleported, and most of all, the way he wanted to punch anyone that looked at him. He couldn't avoid it without telling his monster-hunting parents that he'd become the very thing they hated.

"Are you sure about this, Danny?" his friend Sam asked, careful to keep from looking straight at him. "We can always just skip class if you need another day."

He shook his head.

"At this rate, I doubt I'll ever be ready, and I have to come back to school sometime. Might as well get it over with," he said.

"Alright, but first, just let me - " Tucker said, fumbling in his pockets and pulling out a pair of sunglasses.

"Here you go," he said, handing them to Danny.

"What are these for, exactly?" Danny asked.

"Dude, your eyes glow purple. Like, a lot." Tucker said.

"And with sunglasses on, no one will be able to see his eyes," Sam said, catching on. "Good thought, Tuck."

"Okay, good idea," Danny said, slipping the sunglasses on. The world looked a shade darker, and his friends peered at his face, making sure his eyes were hidden.

"Okay, I think we're ready," Sam said. "Just remember to let us know if you need us to talk you out of something."

Danny nodded. They'd figured out that when he was being stared at, when that logic-less rage started boiling inside of him, he couldn't really talk much. Or think much. It was just one more problem to deal with at this point.

The trio walked into the school, with Tucker on one side of Danny and Sam on the other, shielding him from as many stares as possible. Still, he could feel the prickling heat of glances landing on his wrist, his shoulder, the back of his head. The anger rose naturally, as if being looked at was a legitimate reason to be outraged. Danny's teeth ground together and his hands began to shake as he tried desperately not to turn around and punch whoever was looking at him right in the face.

"You okay, man?" Tucker asked, his voice low so none of the other students they were passing would hear.

"Fine," Danny growled out. He could deal. He had to.

Sam loosely grabbed Danny's wrist and pulled him to the side, into their first classroom of the day - Mining History. Their teacher, Mr. Lancer, was already seated at his desk, and a few students were lounging at theirs.

Being in the classroom, especially with so few people, was better than being in the hallway. Danny let out a small sigh of relief as the sensation of people looking at him lessened and the rage dissipated some.

"Ah, Mr. Fenton," Mr. Lancer said, swiveling in his seat to face the trio. Sam and Tucker tried to shield Danny's body, but Mr. Lancer always insisted on making eye contact, and his eyes locked onto Danny. All the anger shoved to various corners of Danny's mind came together and focused on the teacher, and Danny was glad Sam and Tucker were standing in front of his arms, because they were shaking with the exertion of keeping himself from lunging at the teacher and attacking him. He could _feel_ his eyes glowing, and it was a good thing that Tucker had thought of the sunglasses, because otherwise everyone else would be able to see them. As it was, a little purple light was leaking out and landing on Tucker and Sam's shoulders.

"Glad to see you're feeling better," Mr. Lancer continued. "I take it you won't be spending any more time around your parents' inventions?"

Sam's elbow to his gut forcibly brought Danny into the conversation.

"Right," he said, hoping it made sense in context.

"And I hope you're not planning on wearing those sunglasses in class," Mr. Lancer began, but Tucker started talking.

"Actually, Mr. Lancer, the accident kind of messed with Danny's vision - you know, screwed up his light perception and stuff. So he has to wear the sunglasses for a little while - because otherwise he wouldn't be able to see much at all, it would be too bright."

Mr. Lancer blinked, thinking.

"Very well then," he said. "But I expect that as soon as his vision is back to normal, he'll be coming to class without them."

Sam elbowed Danny again, and he nodded.

Mr. Lancer nodded at the trio and turned his attention back to the open book on his desk.

Danny's anger dissipated in the span of a few seconds.

The trio started moving towards the student desks quickly.

"I take it you'll want to sit in the back?" Sam asked.

Danny nodded his head. The drastically different nature of what he was now was fresh in his mind, as just moment ago he had wanted to attack his teacher for making eye contact. He didn't know if he could make it through class with people glancing at the back of his head.

The three slipped into seats in the very back row, up against the wall.

If just walking into the school had already been so difficult, how would he make it through the rest of the day? How would he handle lunch in the cafeteria, or gym class, or even the end of the day, when Dash Baxter usually picked on him? If the casual glances of a handful of people, or eye contact with one person, were enough to throw him into a nearly uncontrollable rage, how would he handle ever being around people? How would he have a life now that he wasn't even all human anymore?

"Danny?" Tucker asked. "You okay?"

Danny pulled himself out of his thoughts and looked at his friend, who was giving a concerned glance to the air a half-inch from Danny's face, careful to avoid making this day any harder for his friend. Danny could feel Sam's warm hand on his shoulder.

"We're here for you, Danny," she said.

Maybe he wasn't human. Maybe he was a monster, or at least half of one. Maybe he would never be normal again. But his friends didn't care.

"I know," Danny said.


	2. Portal

**Hello there, and welcome to the second oneshot! This one is my take on Danny's portal accident in the world of Minecraft. Still based on zilleniose's ender!danny crossover AU.**

**I don't own either Danny Phantom or Minecraft, I don't own the idea of this AU, please don't sue me.**

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Description: The End Portal might have been off-limits, but it didn't work anyway, so what would be the harm in showing it to a couple friends?

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Portal

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His parents' lab was supposed to be strictly off-limits to anyone who wasn't family. Most of the time, it was.

But yesterday, his parents had finished working on their new End Portal - a device that would, in theory, create a pathway between their lab and the End, the dimension from which Endermen supposedly came.

Like a lot of their inventions, it hadn't worked. Their kids hadn't been surprised, but they themselves were devastated. The portal had been months of effort and hard work, late nights spent working out crafting recipes and mining for materials. And it had all been for nothing.

Now, they couldn't stand to be in the lab. The intricate-looking but useless Portal was situated smack in the middle of the room (a decision made when they were sure it would work), and they couldn't take such a visible reminder of their failure without getting depressed.

Which, Danny reasoned, made this the _perfect_ time to show it to his friends.

Tucker and Sam already knew about the Portal. Danny had been complaining about his parents' devotion to it for almost as long as they'd been building it. Both of them were more excited to see it than Danny was - Tucker because of his undying love for anything complicated and technological, and Sam because of her fascination with anything creepy and with monsters in general - so Danny figured they should get the chance to see it, even though it didn't work.

Normally, at least one of his parents was in the lab at most hours - the only exception being late at night when they were sleeping. However, having Sam and Tucker over so late didn't usually work out too well. But now, the lab was empty most of the time. Even better, the day after the Portal's failed unveiling, his parents had a parent-teacher conference with Jazz in tow - no doubt it would just be a lot of praising Jazz's devotion to her studies, but it was the perfect opportunity, so Danny had invited Sam and Tucker over to his house after school.

"Wow, I can't believe this is your basement, dude," Tucker said, looking at all the various corners of the lab. The walls were made of blastproof obsidian (which was a good thing considering how often inventions - especially his dad's - exploded), and strewn about the room were various machines and technological instruments. The smell of redstone dust, like clay and ozone mixed together, was thick in the air.

"I can't believe your parents made all this stuff," Sam said, studying an intricate layout of redstone dust, torches, and switches. Her gaze shifted to the large, vaguely square-shaped layout of redstone, mostly-sandstone blocks, and ender pearls in the middle of the room.

"Is that the portal?" she asked.

"Yeah," Danny said. "Looks a lot more impressive than it is, really. The most it's done is give off some particles, and that was only right after they tried to activate it."

"Still, this thing looks advanced," Tucker said, hands hovering mere inches away from the Portal, itching to get his hands on it.

"Yeah, which is why you shouldn't mess with it," Danny said, glaring. Tucker's hands reluctantly retreated to his pockets.

"Oh, come on, Danny," Sam said, walking over to join the two boys. "He's just curious. Don't pretend like you're not even a little bit interested in what's on the other side of that Portal."

"Okay, it is pretty interesting, just . . . you guys aren't really supposed to be down here, much less messing around with my parents' inventions."

"Oh, relax, Danny," Sam said. "Your parents will never know we were down here."

She paused to pull something out that Danny hadn't noticed before - a camera.

"Now, I want some pictures of this thing," she said. "Danny, you want to get in the frame?"

"Why me?" Danny asked.

"It's _your_ parents' portal," Sam said. "You in or not?"

"Sure, why not?" Danny said.

For the next few minutes, Sam almost-continuously ordered Danny into different poses near the Portal, becoming gradually more and more ridiculous.

"Geez, Sam," Danny said from his position standing on the edge of the Portal. "What's up with these pictures? I mean, it's not like anyone but the three of us is ever going to see them."

"I've been taking classes," Sam said. "Composition, lighting - I wanted to try it out, okay? Besides, I've never had anything as cool as the Portal to photograph before."

"Okay, but why do I have to be in so many of these pictures?" Danny asked, shuffling to the side in accordance with Sam's hand gesture. "I mean, couldn't you . . . "

Danny's left foot slipped off the back of the sandstone block, and Danny fell into the area ringed by sandstone that should have been the portal.

Thankfully, as the teens knew, the portal didn't work, so instead of falling into another dimension, Danny just landed on the floor and got the wind knocked out of his lungs.

"Danny!" Sam called, rushing to the edge of the Portal. "Are you okay?"

Danny, still struggling to fill his lungs, couldn't say anything, but he nodded, pushing himself off the ground. Sam reached out a hand to help him up, and he reached for her hand in return.

But before they connected, there was a shift in the air. The pressure of static electricity pressed against the skin of the three teens, and the smell of ozone - and something else, something they couldn't identify - filled the room.

Danny looked down at his hand, the one that was still on the ground.

It was lying in a pile of now-scattered redstone dust.

Apparently the problem with his parents' Portal was not a fundamental one, but merely a slight misplacement of the redstone, because now the Portal was humming to life, kicking out clouds of purple and black particles so thick that Danny lost sight of the lab, of Tucker, even of Sam. Only the faintest outline of Sam's pale hand was visible.

"Danny!" Sam and Tucker called simultaneously.

Danny sprung to his feet, rushed towards Sam's hand, the only marker of the edge of the Portal, but he was too late.

The Portal kicked into full gear, and Danny couldn't move.

The pain was immediate, and terrible - like his entire body was being shredded, ripped apart molecule by molecule, and electricity was flowing where his blood should have been. His vision was flashing, back and forth between two scenes, two worlds.

Thick, black clouds of particles. His parents' lab.

Endless white plains under a pitch black sky, dotted with the tall, menacing figures of Endermen. The End.

So it existed, Danny thought faintly. The pain was starting to feel foreign, a degree removed from his mind. His thoughts were fading.

He was dying.

Then came a new pain, a doubling of what he felt - almost like he was dying twice at once, or at least dying twice as horribly.

There was a sickening feeling in his chest, as all the muscles contracted and hardened. Small, sharp shards were working their way through skin, muscle, even bone, into the center of Danny's chest, and gathering there, piecing themselves together, and then hardening into place, into a perfect and heavy sphere.

The pain was lessening now, and Danny realized he had been screaming. His vision slowed its flashing, until he was in each place for a few seconds, and then maybe half a minute, and then it stopped flashing altogether, and he began making out the details of his parents' lab.

Or at least, its ceiling.

Danny propped himself up with his arms so he could look around - he _really_ didn't feel ready to be standing just yet.

It seemed Sam and Tucker had pulled him out of the Portal, and he looked over and found it stable, kicking out a moderate amount of black particles from a glowing black ethereal portal.

Okay, so the Portal definitely worked now.

But where were Sam and Tucker?

A quick scan of the room found them huddled over by the stairs, whispering to each other in urgent tones. Sam seemed to be crying, or at least, there were tear tracks running down her cheeks, paved with her dark Goth makeup.

Her eyes flitted towards him, and Danny felt a sudden, sharp pain in his shoulder. She looked away almost immediately, and the pain vanished as suddenly as it came.

What exactly had happened?

"Guys?" Danny asked, surprised when his friends flinched at the sound of his voice. "What's going on?"

Okay, admittedly, he did sound a bit weird, distorted and raspy. But hey, he'd just been caught in an impossible limbo between dimensions. A sore throat wasn't that unbelievable, right?

"Oh man," Tucker said. "Oh man, oh man, oh man. What do we do?"

"I don't know," Sam said.

"Guys? What's going on?" Danny asked again. He could feel dread rising in him as he noticed that his voice was sounding too weird for it to be a sore throat, and he could have sworn that his arms weren't long enough to prop him up this tall.

"Danny?" Sam asked hesitantly. She seemed to be very carefully and determinedly not looking at him, but rather a bit to his left.

"Who else?" he asked. There was his voice again. It was kind of creepy, actually.

"We didn't know, after the Portal turned on everything was happening so fast that we couldn't tell, and then . . ."

Sam didn't seem to know what to say. That was a real first in all the years he'd known her. Sam was the master of witty backtalk and smart excuses, of talking on the fly in general. But now Tucker was taking over the conversation.

"I don't know how we can explain this," he said. "Do your parents have a mirror down here, dude?"

"Of course, they have one over by the - " Danny cut himself off before he could say _sink_. He'd been able to ignore the way his voice sounded, more or less, when he was talking in short bursts, but now he definitely noticed it, the way his voice sounded like a radio being tuned in and out of the right stations. It wasn't something he was trying to do - he was trying to talk as normally as he could - it was just _happening_.

"You might want to look in it, dude," Tucker said.

Danny nodded and stood up.

Or tried to.

Had the ceiling always been that low?

Wincing, Danny slouched a bit and walked over to the corner of the room where his parents kept the sink and the mirror above it. He looked into it - and promptly jumped back in surprise.

Under different circumstances, Tucker would have laughed. Maybe Sam, too. But right now there was nothing funny about Danny stumbling away from the mirror, trying to figure out what kind of elaborate trick his friends were playing on him - because this had to be a trick, right? Nothing like this could happen in real life.

In the mirror, where Danny's reflection should have been, was an Enderman.

Sure, it was more human-looking than the average Enderman, with discernible hair and a more humanoid body shape, not _quite_ as tall or thin as the average Enderman, but definitely an Enderman. There was no arguing with the freakishly long arms and legs, pitch-black skin, and glowing purple eyes.

What was scarier, though, was that the creature in the mirror was copying Danny's every move, almost like it was his actual reflection.

It was.

This had to be a dream. It couldn't be real, could it? People didn't _become_ Endermen. It was impossible.

But being caught in the Portal as it turned on . . . that had changed him, hadn't it? He could still feel the heavy sphere resting in his chest - the Enderpearl, he guessed. The part of Endermen that people died trying to get, the thing that sold for incredibly high prices. And now he had one. Inside him.

He focused on the pearl, its solid coolness, simultaneously alien and a natural part of him. Did he even still have a heart? Yes, there it was, faint and weak, pumping at half the speed it should have been.

_Come on_, he urged it. _Start beating like normal again. Prove I'm still human._

And amazingly enough, it did. The heart picked up speed and strength, beating like normal in a few seconds.

Around Danny's ankles, a cloud of purple particles, too thick to see through, formed. It rose, sweeping over his whole body, and then dissipated into thin air.

His reflection - in fact, all of him - was human again. He could still feel the weight of the Enderpearl nestled in his chest, around his ribs, but his heart was beating, and his skin was its normal color, and his eyes no longer glowed purple. He might have been a couple inches taller than he had been that morning, but that was it. He was human again.

Sam and Tucker, who had been watching from the stairway, were entranced.

"Danny?" Sam asked him. Danny turned his head and caught her gaze. The feeling of her eyes on him hurt like fingers pressed against a fresh bruise, and he could feel a faint anger rising inside of him as her gaze lingered, but he still smiled.

"Yeah, Sam," he said. "It's me."


	3. The Day After

**Wow, another one already? When I can't even keep my other story updating once a month? I'm just as surprised as you are.**

**Just a really short little thing based on zilleniose's DP/Minecraft crossover AU.**

**I don't own the rights to DP, Minecraft, or even the AU.**

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Description: The morning after the portal accident, Danny begins to realize just how much he's been affected. Takes place between Portal and Staring.

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The Day After

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The day after the accident, Danny woke up on the roof.

The sun was just rising when he came to, and for a few seconds he didn't realize where he was. He stretched and reached for his blanket - which wasn't there.

It was then that he opened his eyes all the way and found himself on the roof of FentonWorks, a good thirty feet above the ground.

"How on Earth did I get up here?" he said, looking around. The roof was perfectly normal - or at least, there were no obvious signs of how he'd gotten up here. No ladder leaning against the side of the house, no hole beside him that he might have come through, just an ordinary roof.

Danny walked to the edge of the roof and looked down at the ground. There was no one there, either waiting to see the effects of a prank or trying to figure out a way to get him down. If anyone knew he was up here, they must not have cared too much.

But seriously, how had this happened? He hadn't come up here on his own, or at least he couldn't remember doing it if he had, and it didn't seem like anyone else had put him up here.

However he got up here, though, he still had to find a way down. He began walking around the edge of the roof, looking for anything between him and the ground he might be able to jump down onto. His bare foot scraped against one of the roofing tiles and he winced. That had hurt a lot more than it should have. He looked down and saw that his foot, both of his feet, were covered in angry red burns, splitting fractally, like snowflakes.

Then he remembered the accident.

The portal coming on with him inside, the incredible pain as electricity flowed through him, the awful minutes after he'd come out when he looked more Enderman than human.

No doubt that had something to do with this. His parents had said the Portal was probably unstable; maybe it was creating other portals, and one of them had taken him to the roof?

Danny looked down at the back yard far below. If he hit the ground from this height, there was a good chance he'd break a leg, but maybe if he could land on the roof of the old treehouse in the back . . .

There was an odd clenching in his chest, as the muscles tensed around the momentarily-forgotten Enderpearl inside him, which gave a little jerk forwards, and Danny was on the roof of the treehouse.

"What the . . . " Danny couldn't help but say, turning his head to look back at the roof, where he'd been a second ago. He was just in time to see the last of a faint trail of purple particles leading in a straight line from where he'd been standing to where he was now fade away. His eyes widened.

"No, no - it can't be like that. I couldn't have - " he rambled, before cutting himself off. There was only one way to know for sure.

Danny closed his eyes and focused on his room, specifically on the spot just next to his bed where he would have been standing right now if he hadn't woken up on the roof.

His chest did the odd clenching-and-jerking thing again, and Danny opened his eyes.

He was in his room, in the exact spot he'd been imagining. It felt like his stomach would hit his knees, it sunk so fast.

He scanned the room, and sure enough, there was a barely-visible and dissipating trail of purple particles leading from where he was standing towards the backyard. In a couple seconds, it was gone.

Danny sat down on his bed - hard. He just couldn't stand anymore, not now. After all, he'd just teleported - twice! And that was probably how he'd ended up on the roof, too. That was impossible, that couldn't happen! Humans simply couldn't teleport from place to place!

But Endermen could.


	4. Glasses

**Still based on zilleniose's Dp/Minecraft AU. This oneshot takes place soon after 'Staring'.**

**I don't own anything except the exact arrangement of words on the screen.**

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Description: What was supposed to be a carefree afternoon of video games turned out to be a bit more serious than Danny and Tucker expected.

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Glasses

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The trio was surprised at how normal it was becoming to mark the time by how many days it had been since the accident.

It was just such a big event that it seemed natural to measure time by it: before and after the accident made as much sense as BC and AD, except they were measuring in days or weeks instead of years.

It had been almost two weeks. Danny had made it through his first week back at school without his Enderman instincts taking over and him attacking someone, though there were a couple close calls. Now, he was looking forward to relaxing over the weekend.

Before, relaxing would have meant hanging out at the mall, or maybe the Nasty Burger, but now those places were too crowded, too full of wandering eyes for Danny to enjoy. So instead, he headed over to Tucker's house to chill in the basement and play video games.

Sam had been forced into dress shopping with her mother, but the boys were fine with that - after all, _girls_ weren't supposed to be good at video games and she'd just slow things down trying to figure out the controls or something. Secretly, Danny was a bit relieved when he'd heard Sam couldn't hang out with them. He didn't know why, but he could more easily ignore Tucker's stray glances than he could Sam's. In fact, if he didn't see Tuck looking at him, he couldn't even tell that he was.

Hanging out with Tucker made Danny feel, well, _human_, which was something he desperately wanted these days.

So Danny was probably more excited than Tucker was for the afternoon gaming fest.

"Okay, man, I've got it all - Creeper Warfare, Mine Quest, even got Into the Nether," Tucker bragged as he led Danny down the stairs. Half of Tucker's basement was filled with boxes and storage. The other half was set up for gaming - there was a sofa, a TV, and Tucker's impressive collection of video games.

Tucker and Danny sat down on the sofa and Tucker began reaching for the aforementioned games, pulling them into a pile for Danny to pick from. As he was pulling down all the games from a series ever-so-cleverly named 'Cave Game', he blinked a couple times.

"Hold up, man," he said, pulling his glasses off. "There's some kind of crud on these, just let me get it off."

He began wiping the glasses clean on the hem of his shirt.

"You sure, Tuck?" Danny teased. "I don't think that your video game skills would be hurt that much by not being able to see the screen."

"Oh, come on. You just want me to leave them dirty because then you'd actually have a chance at winning," Tucker said, smirking and sending a challenging look Danny's way.

A challenging look that might as well have been a punch to the face.

Danny shied away, ducking behind the couch until he felt his friend's gaze blocked by the furniture.

"Danny? You okay, man?" Tucker asked, slipping his glasses back on and peering over the couch. This time, it was back to normal. Danny couldn't even tell Tucker was looking at him.

"Yeah, I don't know what happened," Danny said, coming around to sit on the couch. "Usually I can't even feel when you look at me, but that time, it was almost as bad as the day after the accident."

"Weird. I thought you'd gotten used to me looking at you."

"Yeah, me too," Danny said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I guess there's a lot more to this that we still have to figure out."

"Am I - like, is me looking at you still like that now?" Tucker asked, glancing at his friend and looking away just as quickly.

"No, it was just that once when you were cleaning your glasses . . ."

Danny trailed off, looking at Tucker's glasses, which were now back on his face.

"Dude, take your glasses off for a second."

"Okay," Tucker said. He slowly took his glasses off, the whole time keeping an eyebrow raised in case his friend couldn't tell that he was totally confused.

As soon as Tucker wasn't looking at him through the glasses anymore, Danny could feel his stare. Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as the first time - more like being pinched than being punched - but still, the change was definitely noticeable.

"Back on," Danny said, and Tucker complied, looking at his best friend as though trying to tell whether or not he'd gone insane.

"Dude, we're idiots," Danny said once Tucker's glasses were back on.

"Yeah, no, not agreeing with you here, I am _definitely _not an idiot," Tucker said.

"No, but seriously, it took us this long to figure it out. I kept thinking that you looking at me didn't bother me because, like, you were around so much or something, but I never got that used to Sam or anything. I can't believe I didn't figure it out."

"Figure what out?" Tucker asked. "You're not making a lot of sense here, Danny."

"Your glasses," Danny said. "That's why it didn't bother me when you looked at me - you were always wearing your glasses."

"Yeah, so?"

"So, don't you remember? Like one of the handful of things we actually know about Endermen? That has to do with glass?"

Tucker paused, thinking.

"Endermen don't get provoked when you look at them through glass," he said. Danny nodded, smiling.

"Dude, we're idiots," Tucker said, smiling.

"Such idiots," Danny said, grinning back.

"Do you want to call and tell Sam, or can I?" Tucker asked. They might have been idiots, but they'd still figured it out before she had. That was rare, and Tucker didn't want to miss the opportunity to shove it in her face.

"Definitely me," Danny said, reaching for his cell phone. He dialed Sam's number from memory and waited for her to pick up.

"Speaker!" Tucker said, and Danny obliged.

Ring, ring.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Sam," Danny said, smirking. "Just wanted to tell you something . . . "


	5. Umbrella

**Yay, another one actually in the right order. Comes after all previously posted oneshots for once. I'm going to start posting these things in the correct order of continuity all the time now.**

**Danny Phantom and Minecraft do not belong to me. The AU belongs to zilleniose, not me. **

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Description: Danny didn't know why his parents were so opposed to getting him an umbrella, but it was quickly becoming a pain to go without one.

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Umbrella

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Danny had found out soon after the portal accident that while water didn't hurt him while he was in human form, it was still very uncomfortable.

Before, he'd been fine with water on his skin. He'd loved swimming and taking hot showers as much as any other teenager, never avoided going out in the rain. But now, the feeling when water touched his skin was tight, itchy - something he'd rather not feel.

For the most part, he just tried to avoid getting wet. He bailed out of swimming easily enough, and when his parents had him water the lawn he'd stand on the driveway to avoid stepping in wet grass. He'd figured out how to shower with as little time in the water as possible (which his parents were thrilled about), and ditto for washing his hands (about which his parents were considerably less excited).

The one problem was the rain.

Danny walked to and from school almost every day. It was a good chance to talk with Sam and Tucker without too many people around, and since the accident his legs had been a bit longer and he'd never had trouble making it there in time. But that meant that on most rainy days, Danny was forced out into the fray - and he could only grit his teeth and bear it two times before he broke down and asked his parents for an umbrella.

"Hey, guys?" he'd asked them one morning over breakfast, while they were messing with some new high-tech invention supposed to make it safe to stare at Endermen (he hadn't told them yet that regular eyeglasses worked just fine, because he had no way of explaining to them how he knew).

"Can I get an umbrella?" he asked.

"Danny, sweetie, why would you need an umbrella?" his mom asked, not looking up from the device.

"Yeah, if anything, you should be glad the rain keeps the Endermen away from you!" his dad cried, lifting a screwdriver above his head in a pose that was supposed to be dramatic.

_Gee, actually, it's because I _am_ an Enderman, or at least half of one. Remember the portal accident? Well . . ._

"Just, last time it rained a bunch of my homework got wet and I got points off," he said.

Maddie glanced at her husband.

"We'll see what we can do, sweetie," she said.

And the next day, he found a new, water-proof backpack resting on his desk.

"I should've come up with a better excuse," he complained to his friends over lunch. They were eating outside at one of the picnic tables, far away from any prying eyes - or any eyes, really. It had become their usual spot for exactly that reason.

"Dude, why don't you just buy an umbrella yourself?" Tucker asked. "They have them at the mall, you know."

"He's right," Sam put in.

"Yeah, that's a good idea. Now why didn't _I_ think of that?"

And the trio went to the mall after school and Danny bought an umbrella.

The next time it rained was more than a week later, and Danny thought he'd be all set. He got ready for school, headed to the front door, and pulled out his umbrella, ready to open it when -

"Danny, _what_ are you doing with that umbrella?"

"Mom?" Danny said, turning around to catch his mother coming towards him from the kitchen.

"I'm just walking to school," he said, hoping she'd drop it, but it didn't look likely. She scowled.

"You've walked to school every other day without an umbrella; you'll be just fine without one today," she said, grabbing the umbrella from his hands and walking away.

"What have you got against umbrellas?" Danny asked, genuinely curious and exasperated at the same time.

"Nothing. I've got nothing against umbrellas specifically. I've got _everything_, however, against my son heading to school in the rain with a dry spot around himself, becoming a target for vicious Endermen looking to avoid their well-earned pain and suffering by staying dry."

He was forced to walk to school in the rain, and he never saw the umbrella again.

"Dude, I think your parents might be crazy," Tucker said that day at lunch.

"You think?" Danny said, his voice so sarcastic and biting that Tucker checked to make sure his eyes weren't glowing.

"Why is she so against the idea of me staying dry in the rain? I mean, I got the whole Enderman thing, but just thinking logically, why would an Enderman '_target_' the tiny dry patch under an umbrella instead of, like, the huge dry space inside a house or the school?"

"It's ridiculous," Sam said. "Even if Endermen did that, which _we all know they don't, these are hypotheticals_, it's your choice to carry an umbrella or not."

Danny relaxed (he'd started glaring at her during the 'if Endermen did that' part, because he'd already found out the hard way that teleporting in rain was involuntary and definitely not 'targeted') and agreed.

"This whole thing just sucks," he said, laying his head down on the table.

"Well, then, we need to figure out some way of dealing with it," Sam said, smiling.

The next time it rained, Sam stood waiting outside Danny's front door to walk with him to school, holding a spider-printed black umbrella. Danny dashed out the door and under the umbrella in an instant, only getting a couple drops of water in his hair.

"Let's get out of here before my mom sees and tries to incinerate the umbrella with the Fenton Bazooka or something," he said.

"Relax," Sam said. "It's not like she can decide whether other people's kids carry an umbrella or not. And if she tried, I'm sure my parents would be happy to sue."

"Yeah, I just don't want to risk walking to school in the rain again," Danny admitted.

"Don't worry, you won't have to," Sam said. "We've got your back."

And sure enough, every time it rained, either Sam or Tucker would wait outside Danny's house with an umbrella in hand, ready to keep him dry on the way to school.

He was lucky to have friends like that, he thought.


	6. Reactions

**Well, so much for posting in order. This oneshot comes immediately after Portal, continuity-wise. Hope you enjoy.**

**Quick question - would you prefer that I re-post the oneshots so they're in order according to continuity, or keep them like this, in order by posting date?**

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Description: Danny might have been the only one changed by the portal accident, but he wasn't the only one affected by it.

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Reactions

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Sam couldn't talk.

It was too much for her, the boys thought. For all her talk about the dark, the ethereal, the creepy, she'd never experienced it before. Not like this. And now - she'd almost killed her best friend. She was the reason he'd fallen into the portal, been in agony, almost died.

She was the reason he'd _changed_.

She was silently freaking out, unable to cope as things happened, as she pulled her friend out of the Portal _different_, a monster. Only when Danny was human again could she even begin to recover. The whole thing had been beyond a close call. It was impossible, and yet, apparently possible. Her whole body was shaking, and she felt numb, her thoughts drifting away from her body, leaving her hollow, fragile.

Tucker was on autopilot.

Things were happening, but he didn't process them like Sam was trying to. He just dealt. Sam was freaking out - he dealt with her. Danny was suddenly an Enderman - he dealt with that too. No thinking about what it meant, about how close Danny had come to death. No wondering how it had happened. He could only think ahead a little bit, but it was more than the others could. So it was Tucker that said, "Dude, what are we going to tell your parents?"

"My parents?" Danny asked.

"Yeah. They left, the Portal didn't work. They're going to come back and find it working. What do we tell them?"

"I don't know. I don't know," Danny said. He began running his fingers through his hair, clenching them into fists and holding tight.

In the black glow from the Portal, he looked scary - broken, clinging to sanity by a thread ready to snap. If Tucker hadn't known Danny since preschool, he would have been seriously freaked out.

Danny's thoughts were all over the place.

He'd try to keep them focused on one thing, but they were jumping, scattered. What had happened to him? What would he tell his parents? What was up with Sam? Had he really seen the End? And when he was an Enderman - was that real? How was any of this even possible?

Was he even human anymore?

The three stayed that way for a while - Danny's thoughts racing, Sam teetering on the brink of hysteria, and Tucker trying to get them both to calm down. It worked - a little. Danny was able to sit down and stop tearing his hands through his hair, and Sam was able to talk a little - asking if Danny was okay a hundred times, but still. She mostly stopped shaking, though every once in a while her body would be hit with a faint tremor.

Then the rest of the Fentons got home.

Jazz was surprised the Portal had come on, but she didn't pay much attention to it. She was more occupied with the fact that her brother and his friends all looked worse for the wear, like something awful had happened while she was gone - mostly her brother, who was covered in burns and cuts, but Sam and Tucker were looking pretty haggard too. When Tucker explained to her parents that the Portal had come on by itself with a big explosion, and that was how Danny had gotten hurt, she'd known he was lying. Most likely they'd been messing around with her parent's stuff and had a close call (very close, judging by how badly Danny was injured), and that was why they were so jumpy.

But that didn't explain the look in her brother's eyes - haunted, almost. A look no fourteen-year-old should ever have.

Her parents were considerably more excited. They didn't notice the trio's odd behavior; they were too caught up in the Portal. They'd barely heard Tucker's weak explanation before they were off, grabbing notepads and complicated equipment and beginning to work with the Portal, taking readings and making notes, hovering about and smiling like maniacs. When Jack had seen the Portal was on, he'd even jumped up and down with happiness like a little kid. Even Maddie barely looked up when the kids left.

Once on the ground floor, the trio left Jazz in the kitchen and began climbing the stairs to Danny's room. They didn't speak. They didn't trust themselves to say the right words, to keep from letting Jazz or Danny's parents know the truth. If Danny being an Enderman had really happened - and each one prayed it was just a hallucination - then they didn't want to know what the monster-hating Fentons would do with that information.

Danny's legs were longer now, and he tripped going up the stairs. Once, twice - his shins were beginning to bruise over. The way he'd always climbed the stairs didn't account for the length of his legs now.

Wordlessly, Sam and Tucker took Danny's elbows and helped him keep his balance as he tripped again.

They made it to Danny's room okay. Sam and Tucker slumped down on Danny's bed, but Danny himself didn't. He stared down at his legs, at the way the jeans that usually bagged on the ground were now ending around his ankles, feeling the bruises from the edges of the stairs forming already.

Abruptly, he yanked up one pant leg, revealing his shin. It was longer, now, and thinner than it had been that morning. The bruise from the stairs was already purple, but under that Danny could see the angry red burns from the electricity, splitting into fractals like lightning had been tattooed on his skin. In places his leg was blackened, burned beyond help by the sheer electricity that had run through his body.

Sam gasped and began crying again.

"Danny, I'm so sorry," she choked out.

"It's fine," Danny said automatically. "I'm fine."

"No, you're not. You're not fine!" Sam said. "You're hurt, and - and I don't know what else! You were an Enderman, Danny, and now you're not - "

"Exactly," Danny said, cutting her off. "I'm not."

He didn't tell them about the Enderpearl that still rested in his chest, heavy and foreign. They didn't need to know, especially not Sam, especially not now.

"But it's all my fault!" Sam cried. "It's my fault you got hurt, Danny, and it would have been my fault if you'd . . . if you'd . . ."

But she couldn't bring herself to say the word _died_.

"No, Sam," Danny said, sitting on the bed next to her. "I'm the one that took you guys to see the Portal, and I'm the one who agreed to mess with it. I should have been more careful, and then maybe none of this would have happened. It's not your fault, Sam; it's mine."

"You can't blame yourself, man," Tucker cut in. "I don't think any one of us is to blame here. Sure, you brought us to the lab and Sam posed you with the Portal, but neither of you is to blame. Heck, maybe I'm the one to blame, since I'm the first one who tried to mess with the Portal."

"Tucker - " Danny began to say, but Tucker cut him off.

"No, dude, it's not your fault. It's no one's fault. It's just how things happened. The Portal turned on, you got hurt, some crazy shit went down - it's not because of any one of us. Got that?"

Danny nodded, and Sam nodded too, wiping tears and makeup from her cheeks.

"Look, Danny, Sam and I should get home. Maybe what we all need is some time to think this over. We can talk in the morning, when we've all calmed down," Tucker said.

Sam nodded and stood up.

"That's probably a good idea," she said.

Danny stood up too, and walked his friends to the front door.

"We'll come back over tomorrow morning," Tucker said. "Maybe we'll be able to make sense of all this."

"I sure hope so," Danny said.

"We will," Sam said, a hint of her strength and determination returning. "We'll figure this out together."

"Thanks, guys," Danny said. He shut the door. His friends left, certain they'd be able to figure out what had happened.

Danny was almost certain they wouldn't.


	7. Powers

**Wow, the view count for this story just passed 1,000. That's amazing, and I'm glad so many people think this is worth taking a look at. To celebrate, I pushed up the next update a little. It's short, it's angsty, but I hope you'll like it. **

**Also, in case you didn't know: I take suggestions for oneshots for the ender!danny AU all the time on my Tumblr, and you're welcome to request through FFN as well, using PM or reviews. I won't always get it written or posted so quick, but I take all of them into consideration!**

**I don't own Danny Phantom or Minecraft. The AU idea belongs to zilleniose on Tumblr, not me.**

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Description: Sam and Tucker had figured the portal accident had left Danny more or less the same, so they were pretty surprised to hear about the powers.

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Powers

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Since the accident, Danny had learned he had powers.

Enderman powers.

Teleportation was the biggest one, the most obvious. He'd known about that one the morning after the accident, when he woke up on the roof. It was a situation he found himself in most mornings, now: waking up somewhere that wasn't his bed. That one made sense, at least; everyone knew Endermen could teleport.

The healing was less obvious, but on the second day Danny had noticed that the blackened parts of his skin were already gone, and most of the small scrapes had healed up completely. It seemed he could heal faster than normal, and from greater things than he could before. The scars from the electrical burns were barely visible only a week after the accident.

Being able to tell when he was being looked at wasn't a power, not really. Not unless he wanted to make sure no one was looking when he did something inhuman, but he never did those things on purpose. Never.

He could see in the dark now. The lack of light didn't even phase him. He'd look up at the clock and realize it was midnight and he didn't have any lights on and that it was probably pitch black in his room, but he could still see just fine.

He was faster. Part of that was that his legs were longer now - he'd gained a few inches in the Portal accident - but part of it was something else, something that allowed him to duck out of the way of swinging doors and distracted parents with hardly a moment's notice.

He was stronger, too. His senses were increased - hearing, smell, sight all kicked up a notch.

Another kid might have been thrilled - after all, superpowers? Doesn't everyone want those?

But not Danny.

To Danny, these weren't superpowers so much as Enderman powers, monster powers, something that made him less human. A lingering reminder of what had happened to him in the Portal accident, and how he wasn't exactly human, not anymore.

He didn't want to tell Sam and Tucker. But after the third morning he woke up outside the house without knowing where he was or how long he'd been there, and the seventh time he winced when his sister looked at him without being able to tell her why, he figured that he had to tell someone if he didn't want to go insane, and they were the best choice he had.

So he invited them over after school, brought them up to his room, locked the door, and told them everything. Or almost everything. Even then, there were a few things he kept to himself, afraid of scaring off his only friends.

He didn't sugarcoat it, though. He wanted his friends to know the truth about what he could do, and he didn't try to make it sound better than it really was. Quite frankly, he expected them to be scared. To run, maybe, or say they never wanted to see him again.

He didn't expect excitement.

"Dude, that is so cool!" Tucker cried when Danny was done explaining.

"Huh?" Danny asked, surprised.

"That's incredible, Danny!" Sam said. "I can't believe it."

"So , let me get this straight," Tucker began. "You can actually teleport? Like, one place to another, poof, there?"

"Well, yeah, but - "

"Do you know what this means? You can do things that no one else has ever been able to do," Sam said. "Why didn't you tell us earlier?"

"I - I guess I just didn't want to."

"Why not?" Tucker asked.

"I guess . . . because I was scared."

"Scared of what?" Sam asked, serious now.

Of your reactions. Scared that you would leave, turn your back on me and never see me again if you knew what I could do, what I am now. Scared to see expressions of fear on your faces, to see you afraid of me. Scared that you'd think I wasn't human anymore, scared that you'd be right.

Of the powers. Of the fact that I can do things humans can't, of the fact that is makes me more monster than human. Scared of what I can do now, scared of the other creatures that can do these things. Scared of what this means about Endermen, about how much tougher they are than we know. Scared that I could become one.

Of me. Scared of myself, what I could become, what I am now. Scared that I'm a monster, that I'll hurt someone, that I'll hurt _you_.

"I don't know," Danny said. "I was just scared."

"Danny, you shouldn't be scared," Sam said.

"Yeah," Tucker said. "We're your friends."

He smiled because he knew he couldn't convince them that they were wrong.


	8. Clay

**Hello everyone! This chapter is just a drabble, so sorry for giving you something so short, but the next update will be a lot longer.**

**To those of you without accounts: I sometimes want to reply to a review, but can't do so without clogging up the Author's Note. Would it be okay if I replied to non-user reviews on my Tumblr (avataggart dot Tumblr dot com) instead of here?**

**I don't own Danny Phantom, Minecraft, or the idea behind this AU.**

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Description: Danny finds a block of clay. Drabble. Requested by Anon on Tumblr.

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Clay

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They were walking through the woods when he saw it.

There, on the bank of a river. Smooth, even, perfect.

A block of clay among the dirt, wet with river water.

His feet found their way to it without thought or awareness, driven by instinct alone. It was even more perfect up close, practically begging him to reach out, to touch it.

So he did.

He reached for the clay, grabbed it between his hands, pulled it from the ground. It was his now, and no one else's. His eyes traced its surface, its indents and edges.

All his.

...

"Danny?"


	9. Clay (continued)

**Hello everyone! The following Author's Note is pretty important, so if you could all take a moment to read it, that would be great :)**

**First off, ****to those of you without accounts: I sometimes want to reply to a review, but can't do so without clogging up the Author's Note. Would it be okay if I replied to non-user reviews on my Tumblr (avataggart dot Tumblr dot com) instead of here? I have Anon asks and submit on, so you can even send me links if you want. That way I can chat with you without making these chapters half made up of bold text. **

**Also, we are getting into the PLOT RELATED ONESHOTS! Yay! What does this mean for you guys? It means I'm going to be posting the oneshots in order, and that most oneshots will be best understood if you've read the oneshots that have come before them. For the first plot-related oneshot, Berserk, you'll understand it best if you've read all the oneshots that have been published, including this one. I'll have this in the AN for Berserk as well, just figured I'd give you a heads up! :)**

**This next part is just for Inviso-Al, and everyone else can just skip to the oneshot. Hope you enjoy!**

**To Inviso-Al: I'm sorry if it seemed like I was being critical; I assure you that I didn't mean to attack or insult you in any way. I'm sorry for misgendering you, I saw the Al part of your name and made assumptions, which I shouldn't have. As I take requests for oneshots pretty much all the time, I thought your review was a request (I have treated other reviews of yours in the same way and woven in aspects you asked about in your reviews into the plot). Unfortunately, I got confused and wanted to make sure that if I wrote something for the request it would be what you were looking for. Please feel free to get in touch with me through Tumblr at any time. **

**I don't own Danny Phantom or Minecraft.**

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Description: Danny finds a block of clay, and Sam and Tucker try to get him to drop it. Requested by messica-miles on Tumblr.

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Clay (continued)

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It was his eyes that scared her the most.

They'd been walking through the woods when Danny had stopped to pick up a random block of clay from the riverside. He pulled it from the ground and stared at it, smiling, eyes glazed over, unfocused.

"Danny?" Sam asked. "What are you doing?"

Danny gave no indication that he had heard her.

"Seriously, Danny, what are you doing?" Tucker asked.

No response.

Danny was holding the block of clay out in front of him, eyes sweeping its surface as though it was something spectacular and not a lump of clay. They didn't so much as glance at his friends for a second.

"Danny, snap out of it," Sam said.

Nothing.

Their friend had done some weird stuff ever since the portal accident, but for Sam and Tucker, this was the creepiest of all. By any logical account, it didn't make sense - after all, why should this freak them out more than his glowing purple eyes, his teleportation, or the ability to tell when he was being looked at?

But they'd always been able to pull Danny back to himself after a moment or two, even when he was consumed by the irrational anger that now accompanied being stared at.

But now? Danny might as well have been deaf for all the effect their words were having on him.

"Danny, knock it off," Tucker said. "You're starting to freak me out."

Danny stood, swaying slightly, looking at the clay. He had a dopey grin on his face, a grin that screamed of his personality, but his eyes were almost blank. Vacant.

Sam knew then that Danny couldn't hear them.

She shot him a glare that would have had him wincing, if he had still been Danny, but it seemed like no matter how long or intensely she looked at him, he didn't notice. He was taller, now, and thinner than before the accident. She hadn't had a chance to notice that before.

She shook her head. _Stay focused, Sam_, she thought. _Just focus on getting him to snap out of it._

Well, if the clay had caused this, maybe getting it away from him would reverse the effects, make him be Danny again. She didn't want to consider any alternatives, didn't want to wonder what would happen if she got the clay away and his eyes stayed vacant and what made Danny himself stayed gone.

She walked up to him, taking long, purposeful strides, trying not to show that she was freaked out by this at least as much as Tucker was.

Danny didn't even notice her approach.

"Come on Danny, put the clay down," Sam said, nudging his shoulder in hopes that touch would work where sound had failed.

Danny swayed to the side, away from her nudge, but didn't give any other indication that he knew she was there.

"Danny. Seriously. If you think this is funny, it's not," Sam said. Again, no response.

Sam shoved harder against Danny's shoulder, but he just swayed and then straightened again, like some kind of children's toy, a mindless marionette in the shape of her friend.

Seeing him like this scared her intensely. To see her friend nearly lifeless, face flat, eyes dead, _that_ was more terrifying than any horror movie she'd seen.

"That's it," Sam said, and she grabbed the lump of clay Danny was holding with both hands and tried to pull it away from him.

His loose grip on the clay tightened in an instant, and Sam found herself struggling against him, pulling the clay as hard as she could, but she couldn't get it away from him. She dug her boots into the ground and pulled, leaning her body weight into trying to get the clay out of Danny's hands, but it didn't move an inch.

Her hands lost their grip on the clay and Sam went stumbling backwards, thrown back by momentum when there was nothing left to pull against. She landed on the ground, her hands wet from the clay.

She looked over at Danny, hoping maybe he had stumbled too, and dropped the clay, but no. He was still standing there, grinning at it.

"What are we gonna do?" Tucker asked. "We can't leave him here, not with all the monsters in the woods at night, and anyone who sees him like this will _know_ something is off. It would really suck if _this_ is the thing that blows his secret."

"I don't know, Tuck," Sam said. "I don't know what we _can_ do."

They looked over at Danny, who was swaying and grinning and still staring at the clay with those empty, empty eyes. Their friend was gone, right now. Unreachable.

"I hate this!" Sam said. "I hate that stuff like this _happens_ to him and we can't do anything about it and neither can he! And I _hate_ seeing him stare at that clay like it's God or something just because it brainwashed him!"

"Sam, calm down!" Tucker said, but it was too late. Sam wasn't in the right mindset to listen to logic or appeals or much of anything. She knelt and picked up part of a fallen tree branch, short but thick and heavy, and she chucked it at Danny's swaying form, hoping to knock that goddamn clay out of his hands.

The branch caught Danny in the gut, and he went stumbling backwards. One step, two. His hold on the clay was still tight when he reached the riverbank and stumbled onto the slippery mud. His legs flew out from under him, and he went tumbling into the water.

"Danny!" Sam and Tucker cried in unison, Sam thrown out of her mood by the sight of her best friend falling into the current. The river wasn't all that fast, or deep, and Danny knew how to swim, but in his current state Sam doubted he'd even notice he was in the river until he'd already drowned.

The two friends raced for the bank, ready to pull Danny out, but before they got there a pale hand appeared on the bank. Then another. Then there was Danny, soaking and looking both grumpy and utterly confused, pulling himself up out of the river. He dragged himself out onto the grass and sat up, wringing the water from his hair and clothes.

"How," Danny began. "Did I end up in the _river_?"

Sam found herself checking his hands first, finding them empty of clay, excluding a few reddish streaks on his palms. Then his eyes, which were darting back and forth between her and Tucker, and confused. Not empty. Not blank or soulless.

"Seriously, what happened?" Danny asked.

"Dude, I don't think even we know that," Tucker said, but of course Danny only got more confused, so Sam and Tucker found themselves telling Danny about what he'd been doing, and what had happened to him, which they both would have thought was really weird, considering he should have been there and known but hadn't, if they hadn't been so glad to see him alive and himself again.

"And then Sam chucked a dead branch at you," Tucker said. "And it whacked you in the gut and you stumbled back and fell into the river."

"Ugh, guess that explains why my stomach feels like it's been run over," Danny said.

"Sorry," Sam said. "I just didn't know what else to do."

"How much of that do you remember, anyway?" Tucker asked. "Any of it?"

"No, not really," Danny said. "I mean, I remember picking up the clay, but then there's just this haze until I just kind of woke up in the river."

"Damn. Well, one thing's for sure," Tucker said.

"What's that?" Danny asked.

"We are never, ever, _ever_ randomly walking through the woods again."

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**Quick AN: I used a lowercase 'd' in the word 'deaf' above because I thought that in this case cultural Deafness is irrelevant. If anyone finds this offensive, please let me know and I'll change it.**


	10. Berserk

**Here it is, the long-hinted-at plot part of the story! This is the first oneshot in the official plot arc (well, except for Portal). This oneshot comes after all previously posted oneshots. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU'VE READ ALL PREVIOUS ONESHOTS BEFORE READING THIS ONE, AT LEAST ONE OF THEM CONTAINS DETAILS CRUCIAL TO UNDERSTANDING THIS ONESHOT. **

**Also, I'm sorry it took me forever to put this up. Unfortunately, I can't tell you when the next one will be, but I'll try to have it not take quite as long. At least this one's long (kind of).**

**(I'm also working on a collab for a new Danny Phantom fanfic, so a lot of my writing time will be going to that)**

**The AU idea belongs to zilleniose, and Danny Phantom and Minecraft aren't mine.**

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Description: Danny's control over his powers was always weak at best, but this was the first time he'd lost it altogether. Requested by Anon on Tumblr.

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Berserk

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Three weeks after the accident.

The physical injuries had all healed, the only trace left of them the faint scars covering Danny's body. Sometimes he would run his fingers over them, tracing the barely-detectable fractal patterns, and marvel at the fact that his body had healed so completely.

He couldn't say the same for the rest of him.

The last few days, he'd been slipping again. Back to the level of control he'd had the first few days after the accident. Worse, even. He'd been teleporting not just when he slept, but whenever he zoned out and happened to think of a place. Twice now it had happened in class. Thankfully, the teacher's back had been turned both times, and his friends had been able to cover for him, but people were going to start getting suspicious soon enough. Even Sam and Tucker were.

He'd told them he was fine, that he was getting control of his powers, getting the hang of using them only when he wanted to. It was temporary, he thought he was coming down with a cold, he could handle it.

It was a lie.

He hated lying to them, to the only people in the world that knew him so totally, knew his secret. Or at least part of it. They accepted him now, but if they knew the whole thing . . . Danny wasn't sure.

Danny's appearance after the portal accident wasn't a one-time thing, like Sam and Tucker thought. Danny had discovered in the first few days of having his powers that he could still transform into an Enderman, or at least something close to one. It was just one more thing that took him farther from being a human and closer to being a monster. Thankfully he hadn't lost control of his transformations yet. He needed to keep it that way.

Danny slumped against the back of the park bench, letting a cool breeze tousle his hair. It was nighttime, and the park was empty. No one else was out - despite the streetlights illuminating the park, most people were still afraid of being attacked by the monsters that roamed in the darkness.

Danny wasn't most people. He'd come here a lot since the accident, even more since his powers started acting up. He'd never had a problem with monsters. Either they really weren't in the park, or they were and for some reason they didn't attack him. He preferred to think the first; after all, there was no reason monsters would avoid attacking him unless they knew what he was, considered him more like themselves than like the humans. And Danny wanted desperately for that to not be true.

The park was a good place to relax. There was no one around to see him, to even know he was there. And with no one around, he could stop struggling and fighting for control of his powers. He could loosen his hold on them, let them do whatever they wanted for a little while. He hoped that this break, short as it was, would help him maintain control during the day, keep him from wearing himself out completely and losing control in school or another public place. It hadn't worked yet, but Danny couldn't deny himself the few minutes of peace.

Somewhere in the woods, a branch snapped.

Danny jerked upright. Was it a monster, coming to attack? It hadn't happened before, but that didn't mean it was impossible - after all, who was he to say _anything_ was impossible?

Another snap.

Danny's heart slowed - a sign his body was getting ready to make the transition to an Enderman. His eyes lit up purple, illuminating the surrounding area. He didn't try to control it - if it was a monster coming, he had to be able to fight it off.

Leaves were rustling - whatever was there was close to the edge of the forest.

Danny stood up, got into a fighting stance. He focused his attention on the Enderpearl in his chest. His heart slowed further, and a ring of purple particles appeared around his ankles. It rose up, washing over his body, transforming him into his Enderman form as it passed. Black skin, long legs, hair that followed the shape of his head instead of spiking outwards. Whatever was there, he was ready for it.

More rustling. And then - something else. Laughter. Human laughter.

Was that - Dash Baxter?

Sure enough, Dash emerged from the woods, with several people following behind him, mostly from the football team. A couple were carrying things – some of them swords, others things too small for Danny to see. What they were doing in the park this late at night, Danny didn't know. But then again, he supposed they would ask the same thing if they saw him. He wasn't thinking entirely right at the moment; the other part of him - the Ender part - was in control. He'd let it take over, thinking it would be better in a fight, but now it seemed that no fight would be happening.

Danny let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding and relaxed. The football players were just walking through here. Soon they'd pass him and he'd just go home. He was leery to teleport anywhere right now, as his parents had anti-Enderman security in their house, so he couldn't go straight there, and every other place he could think of would likely still have people there at this time of night, people that would mistake him for a full Enderman. It didn't matter. He'd just wait a minute, transform back, and go home.

Danny was hit with a sharp burst of agonizing pain. White-hot knives were gouging at his flesh, rabid wolves were tearing him apart, acid was eating him to nothing. Anger rose out of nowhere, the way it did when he was being looked at -

Danny whirled, eyes glowing with rage, to find Dash Baxter frozen in place, eyes locked on Danny's, its prickly heat quickly growing so unbearable Danny wanted to rip his skin off to stop it, except he couldn't move. Dash's eyes were still locked on him, increasing the pain but also keeping Danny trapped, unable to advance and get Dash to _stop fucking staring_.

Snap.

Dash whirled to find the source of the sound, a startled deer that quickly ran off. He paled and turned back around to find - nothing.

With that human's eyes finally off him, Danny was free to leave, to teleport out and into the forest. But that didn't stop the pain eating at his body, didn't lessen the anger that was making it hard to think straight. There was pain, and anger, and Danny knew one thing.

Dash was to blame.

He could tell where the human was, and without knowing exactly, he focused on the boy and found himself behind him. The blond was standing still, unaware. Easy prey.

Danny raised his arms and brought them down on the boy's head.

Dash went down hard, sprawling on the ground. He barely managed to not skewer himself on his sword. But he was still conscious.

Before he could strike back, Danny teleported back to the woods.

It took Dash a second to get back to his feet, but that was all he had. Before he could run more than a few steps, the Enderman was back. This time, Dash turned in time to catch sight of it - towering over him, far too tall to be human, with black skin and glowing purple eyes full of malice. Before the monster hit him again, Dash raised his sword - not to slash at the thing, but as defense. The Enderman apparently didn't notice, because it brought down its arms as before, catching one of them on the sword. It let out a cry of pain - a twisted, mangled sound - and teleported away.

Dash started running again. He had no hope of defeating the Enderman himself, and it was unlikely that any help would come. Daylight might calm the Enderman (he'd heard that somewhere before), but dawn was hours away. His only hope was to get inside a shelter with a roof too low for an Enderman to get under and stay there, wait it out.

It happened that there was a bus stop with an enclosed seating area, one with a low enough roof, right on the edge of the park towards which Dash was running. If he could only make it there in time . . .

From behind him came the sound of the Enderman teleporting in.

He whirled to face it, sword bared, but got caught mid-turn by the monster's long arms, which knocked the wind out of him and sent him stumbling. Before he could even return the blow, the Enderman was gone again.

Attacking Dash wasn't helping Danny any. Sure, it was pleasant to watch the human go stumbling and falling, to cause his life energy to diminish in fits and spurts, but that didn't do much to lessen the anger or the pain. No, no amount of injury would solve this.

Danny wanted Dash dead. He needed Dash dead, to avenge himself, to stop the horrible burning spread over his body so completely.

The boy was moving again. Danny could feel the human's essence, the very thing that had damaged him in the first place, creeping away from him, out of the park.

He teleported behind the blond boy again, not waiting one second to shove the boy from behind and send him facefirst into the dirt. The stone sword flew out of his hand, skittering into the bushes.

Dash began to shake with fear.

Danny raised his arms to strike again, but Dash skittered out of the way, pressed his back against the trunk of a tree, and grabbed a fallen branch. Danny swung for him again, but the boy deflected the blow with the stick. Danny growled and grabbed the stick, throwing it away, and prepared to hit the boy again.

"HEY!" a female voice called out. Danny swore her voice was familiar, but he didn't know from where.

And suddenly, he felt the intense pain of being stared at again.

New fire quickly overcame the old and he found himself honing in on a new essence, a new life energy. Its owner quickly came into view, running towards Danny and Dash.

"Manson?" Dash asked, his voice soft but confused.

"Get out of here!" the attacker said. "I can handle this."

She whirled to face Danny, and her eyes locked on his. Purple on purple.

_Sam?_

But no friendship would be enough to overcome the mind-filling rage quaking inside of Danny now.

Sam steeled herself, then turned and started sprinting. She knew she wouldn't be able to take as many hits from the Enderman as Dash could, and he already looked ready for intensive care. She'd have to be fast, if she wanted to survive. It was a good thing she was in shape, she mused, ducking and weaving between trees and bushes.

But too quickly, she heard the Enderman teleporting in behind her.

She gripped the diamond sword sheathed by her side, but hoped not to use it. Instead, she kept running.

The sound again. The Enderman was teleporting to follow her, just like she'd hoped. But she was running fast enough - if she could keep up this pace, she'd be able to make it!

A fallen branch rose up out of nowhere and caught her ankle, sending her sprawling to the ground.

As soon as she landed, she flipped herself, simultaneously pulling out her sword. Not a moment too soon. The Enderman's arms were swinging for her, and she quickly cut at them with her sword. The Enderman hissed in pain and teleported off, and Sam started running again.

She had to make it. She _had _to.

The Enderman was back. She could hear it following her, but she kept running. She just had to stay ahead, keep going, and going fast. She was getting close, now. She just hoped that this would work. It would work, she told herself, it _had_ to work.

And if it didn't - she couldn't think like that.

There. Sam turned, slightly, and the Enderman kept following her.

Sam found herself in a clearing. Benches, garbage cans - there.

A fountain, turned off for the night, but still full of stagnant water.

Sam jumped the low wall keeping the water in without slowing down and waded her way into the middle of the fountain. The water reached just above her knees - not much, but enough to distract the Enderman. She hoped. This had worked on Danny, after all, so it should work on this Enderman. And if not -

Sam held her sword, ready to swing.

Danny teleported in behind the human only to find his feet and the lower part of his legs immersed in water. The icky, itchy, disgusting feeling was the opposite of pleasant, but it cooled the fire of being stared at in a matter of seconds. Able to think rationally again, Danny looked down at the human he'd been chasing.

Sam.

Black pajamas wet with sweat and fountain water, hair loose around her face, clutching a diamond sword and looking terrified, but undeniably Sam.

And he had been ready to -

Danny looked down at himself, in his Enderman form. There was blood on his hands, almost impossible to see against his black skin, dark and still wet. Whose - ?

Danny had done what he had most feared. He had lost control, and the Enderman had taken over.

Mind reeling, Danny found himself falling, sitting, despite the fact that the water was still swirling around him. If Sam hadn't led him into the water, what would he have done to her? What would she have done to him? God, she didn't even recognize him, did she? If the look on her face was anything to go by, she certainly didn't.

But he had almost hurt her, killed her. He couldn't keep this secret any longer.

He focused on his heart, barely beating at all now, and summoned the ring of purple particles.

He watched Sam's face as he changed. Watched as shock, and horror, washed over it, but never quite replacing the fear. She backed up a couple steps seemingly without realizing it, away from him.

"Danny?" she asked, her voice barely audible, scared.

Danny looked down, at the blood that was still on his hands, more visible now that his skin was a human tan shade. It reflected the moonlight, glistening. If you didn't know what it was, where it came from, it could be beautiful.

And there was so much of it.

"Sam, what did I do?" Danny asked, already afraid of the answer.


	11. Fountain Talks

**Hello everyone! Sorry for leaving you all hanging for so long! I don't know when I'll be posting another oneshot, but this one doesn't end on as much of a cliffhanger, so it should work out better than last time. Hope you enjoy!**

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Description: Every disaster has its fallout, and Danny's loss of control isn't immune. Sam and Danny try to work things out immediately after the events of Berserk.

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Fountain Talks

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"Sam, what did I do?"

The words reached Sam's ears, but not her brain. She was thinking in overdrive now, her body frozen as her mind raced, back to the day of the portal accident, back to the minutes after. Back to what Danny had been.

She had tried to pass it off, after; say that he'd merely gotten Enderman powers, and not become one himself. It had been a temporary effect, portal residue, a hallucination brought on by shock. They'd all tried to delude themselves, never talked about it.

Danny wasn't a monster, she'd told herself. He couldn't be.

Only now, when he sat dripping both water and another person's blood - a person who would be lucky to make it out of this still able to walk without a limp because of the beating he'd received - Sam couldn't deny it.

Danny wasn't human anymore.

And yet, his eyes . . . they were still _his_, blue and pleading and heart-wrenchingly distraught. Had he really not known what he was doing, not been able to control it?

Sam had woken up earlier that night to screaming in the street.

Normally she would have just turned over in bed and waited for it to stop. Every now and then some college kids would get drunk and hang out in her neighborhood to sober up enough to go back to campus without getting in trouble, and they were always loud.

But this wasn't the drunk-off-my-ass delirious screaming she'd heard before. Whoever was screaming, they were panicked and desperate.

So Sam rolled out of bed and opened the window to hear better.

"E-e-e-Enderman! In the park!"

She could feel the blood rushing from her face. Her hands flew to her cell phone, thinking to call Danny to have his parents handle it, but she hesitated. After all, if people had made it out of the park to be screaming, they had to be fine, right? And the Fentons lived on the other side of town, practically. If she woke them up in the middle of the night and asked them to drive over and take care of a monster that wasn't hurting anyone, well, she'd feel really bad – both for them and for the Enderman. After all, if it wasn't doing anything, it didn't really deserve to become a test subject for whatever crazy monster-hunting devices the Fentons were making.

Sam set her phone down and took a closer look at the people in the street. All jocks, most in letter jackets. She could make out Kwan and a couple others whose names she knew in the light of a street lamp. What was weird was that Dash, head jock, was absent. Sam was pretty sure Kwan never went _anywhere_ without Dash, quite possibly including the bathroom. Anyway, none of them seemed to be injured, just scared. They were babbling and yelling, but it was very rarely coherent. Sam could pick out the word 'Enderman' a few more times, and every now and then another actual word would come up, but for the most part the jocks were talking over each other too much for it to make any sense.

"Shut up!" one of the neighbors yelled down at the kids in the street.

"No!" Kwan yelled back. "That thing has Dash!"

Fuck.

She knew she should have called earlier, the Fentons could be here by now, especially with the roads empty, and by now . . .

It didn't take long for an Enderman to be done with a person.

Sam's fingers found the hilt of her diamond sword and began strapping the sheath on almost before she could think.

_If I had called them . . . If I had just trusted myself . . . it's my fault if something happens to him now._

Finished buckling on the sheath, Sam forced her feet into her signature combat boots and did up the laces in seconds. She ducked out through the window and hit the ground a bit harder than she would have liked, and then set out running for the park.

The Enderman that had beaten Dash to within an inch of his life, that had sent the strongest and most violent people in school running and screaming, was actually her friend.

And he didn't know it. He didn't even know what he'd done. He had looked at the blood like he hadn't been the one to draw it, and she could see the horror that dawned in his eyes the instant he realized.

"H-how long," Sam started to say, her voice shaking. Like it or not, she was still shaky and scared, her whole body vibrating and pulsing with adrenaline. This was Danny, she told herself, trying to calm down.

It didn't work.

Sam fisted her hands and drew in a sharp breath, shutting her eyes and forcing her voice to level out.

"How long have you been like that?"

Danny's eyes fell down, to the water of the fountain. The blood was being washed off of him, spreading red through the clear water. Sam opened her eyes, saw it, and shuddered, climbing out of the fountain before the blood could stain her boots. Danny just sat there, lethargic.

"Since the Portal," he said, his voice quieter than Sam had ever heard it. "I didn't tell you or Tucker because – because I didn't want to believe it myself. And I didn't want you to know that I was a monster."

He swept his hand through the stagnant fountain water, more blood running off, forming a trail behind his fingers.

"I guess you know now," he said, his voice flat and dead.

"Danny, you're not - " Sam started to say, but she cut herself off. She wasn't sure, anymore, whether Danny _was_ a monster. He'd beaten Dash to a bloody pulp, but it seemed he'd done it without thinking or even knowing. What did that mean for his humanity?

"I am," Danny said. "I know it. Just – who did I hurt? And how badly? Did I – did I - "

"Dash," Sam choked out. "He's not in good shape – but I think he'll live."

Danny's body sagged with relief. If he had killed someone, he would never have been able to forgive himself. After all, it was him who had attacked Dash, him who had been in the park after dark, him who had fallen into the End Portal and become something less than human. Despite the literal blood on his hands, Danny hadn't killed anyone yet, and it was something to be grateful for.

"It was close, though, wasn't it?" he asked.

Sam nodded.

Danny squeezed his eyes shut and ran his fingers through his hair, twisting and pulling like he wanted to yank the hair out by the roots. Sam looked on, trying to work out what Danny was thinking. A day before, she would have run over and laid a reassuring hand on his should, asked him to talk to her, but now . . .

"I can't let this happen again, Sam," Danny said after a while. "I can't be responsible for killing someone; I can't."

"You won't, Danny," Sam said.

"You don't know that, Sam," Danny said. "I will. Sooner or later, I will, unless I do something first."

"Danny, what are you talking about?"

"If I'm going to kill someone, Sam," Danny said. "Then I want it to be me."

"What?" Sam's response was automatic; she didn't get a chance to think before the words left her mouth. "Danny, that's crazy – you can't do that!"

As horrible as the idea was, she considered it for a moment. After all, she'd just been thinking that maybe Danny wasn't human, maybe he _was_ a monster, and if it was a choice between spending his life killing others and not having one at all . . .

Sam looked at Danny, at his scrawny, too-tall body hunched over, sopping wet and pathetic in the fountain. He looked utterly devastated at what had happened, what he'd done. Surely, death couldn't be the only thing that could keep this from happening again.

"But Sam, if I don't – listen, you won't always be able to come running in with PJs and a sword and be able to stop me, and I'd much rather die than kill someone else, or hurt someone. Do you know how bad I'd feel if I'd hurt you, Sam?"

"Yeah, well, how bad would it hurt us to have you dead, huh?" Sam retorted. "I know I'd be pretty hurt if you just up and killed yourself, and what about Tucker, and your parents, and Jazz?"

"I don't know," Danny said. He buried his head in his hands. "I don't know anything anymore."

"So then you don't know that killing yourself is the best thing to do, either," Sam said.

She looked down at Danny. Huddled in the fountain, in water that was surely making him feel terrible but that he was staying in anyway, with his face hidden in his hands and his body shaking with stress, he couldn't have looked less dangerous. He was unstable, sure, but after all he'd been through, how could he be anything else? It didn't mean that hurting Dash had been okay, but that was unintentional.

"Come on," Sam said, stepping closer to Danny and holding out a hand to help him up, making sure he was able to see it when he pulled his face out of his hands. The look of confusion on his face was like a punch to the gut. Had he honestly thought she would just leave him there?

"Come on," she repeated. "Let's get you home."

"But Sam, I'm _dangerous_. I'm not human anymore, and I can't control myself, and I don't want to hurt you."

"Ok, first of all, I can take care of myself; rest assured, I won't let you hurt me. Yeah, you're dangerous; who isn't, nowadays? I'm not even gonna touch the humanity thing, because that is all kinds of confusing and impossible to prove. And yeah, maybe you can't control yourself, but I bet you can learn to."

"I tried, ok? It didn't exactly work."

"Well, that was just you. Now you've got my help, and I'm sure Tucker will be on board if we ask him."

"Would you really . . . ?"

"Of course," Sam said, smiling as she helped Danny to his feet.

"After all, that's what friends are for."


	12. Archery

**Hey, I'm back. Kind of. **

**Important notes about updates and such at the bottom.**

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Description: There's one thing about Danny the portal accident definitely didn't change. Suggested by beesinmydrawers.

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Archery

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Danny was terrible at archery.

Always had been, and with every day it looked more and more like he always would be. He could miss even a still target by a wide margin. Forget about moving ones - he was more likely to accidentally shoot himself than he was to hit anything moving.

It was something Sam and Tucker teased him about sometimes. That was fine; he'd teased them about things they were bad at too. They were friends, it was okay.

Unfortunately, it was something that almost everyone who saw him shoot teased him about too. And he was not nearly as okay with that.

Now, Casper Mining Academy's primary focus might have been on, well, mining, but there were still classes on weaponry and fighting. It would be downright cruel to send kids out _without_ teaching them those things. So every day after lunch, the students would file into the gymnasium and learn or practice various aspects of self-defense. Hand-to-hand combat, sword fighting, using surroundings to your advantage, fighting in low light - all kinds of things that would be useful in cave systems were covered. But every once in a while the students would shuffle out onto the lawn in back of the school and practice archery.

Today was one of those days.

Danny had been quietly groaning from the moment their teacher announced that they would be doing archery today to the moment she told them all to "shut up and start shooting!" He picked up a bow and a quiver of arrows as though they might bite him and found a place to shoot in between Sam and Tucker. Maybe one of them would be nice enough to plant a couple arrows on his target so he wouldn't get yelled at in front of the entire class for his "pathetic aim".

But from the smirk Tucker gave him, he guessed that wasn't going to happen.

Reluctantly, Danny pulled out an arrow and fitted it to his bowstring. He pulled back, feeling the string tense under his fingers, and tried to aim the arrow at the target in front of him. Who knew, maybe archery was one of the things he'd gotten better at since the portal accident, like running.

Danny released the arrow. It flew forwards, zooming towards his target - and straight over it, into the woods.

Apparently the portal accident hadn't improved his aim after all.

He loaded another arrow and tried again. And again. The most any of his arrows did was nick the corner of the target, and only barely at that.

"Fenton, you're aiming for the target, not the trees!" the coach bellowed as yet another arrow disappeared into the woods. A couple of the nearby students snickered at that - thankfully Dash was on the other side of the field, sinking arrow after arrow into the middle of his target.

"This sucks," Danny said. His quiver was half-empty now, and he needed to get some of the arrows into the target unless he wanted to become another example of how not to shoot a bow and arrow in front of the class.

"Mind helping me out here?" he asked Sam. She smirked, sent an arrow flying into the almost-center of the target, and said, "Figure something out on your own."

Danny sighed and shot another arrow. This one missed the target by almost a foot and went whizzing into the bushes.

Damn, if he kept on like this, he'd be hunting for arrows in the woods while the others were pulling theirs from targets again.

"What, finally find something your powers can't help you with, dude?" Tucker gloated. Ever since Danny had beaten him at running track after the accident, he'd been looking for a chance to beat Danny at something physical.

Danny was pretty sure Tucker was right; archery was something that being half-Enderman couldn't help him with. After all, it wasn't like archery was something helped by having long limbs, or being able to tell when people are looking at you, or teleporting.

Teleporting.

Danny smirked and pulled another arrow out of his quiver, loading his bow but not pulling back the string. Sam and Tucker exchanged nervous glances, wondering what Danny was up to.

Danny could tell no one was looking at him right now, and a quick scan of the field showed no one likely to look at him; all the other students were focused on their respective targets, and the coach was watching as Dash tried to send an arrow into another arrow already lodged in the target.

Danny focused his attention back onto the target, rolling the wooden shaft of the arrow between his fingers.

With a still-unpleasant jolt, he teleported himself straight in front of the canvas-and-wood target. He quickly jammed the arrow into the canvas target, near the edge so no one would think it was too suspicious, and teleported back to his spot in the line of students. The whole thing took only a second or two, and the only signs it had happened were the arrow lodged in the target and a barely-visible trail of purple particles leading from the target to Danny.

Danny could feel the coach's eyes on him now, and winced. Had she seen? Did she suspect? Silently, he prayed for the trail of particles to fade away faster.

"Fenton!" the coach called out. Danny turned around to face her. A couple people nearby turned as well, eager to see wimpy Fenton get mocked for missing the target again.

"Good job. I hope you'll keep improving like this; who knows, one day you may even be decent at it," the coach said.

The others who had wanted to see Fenton get yelled at were surprised, to say the least. When they looked at his target, and saw an arrow in it, a couple were downright shocked. After all, Danny Fenton was _terrible_ at archery.

Danny himself was smiling. After all, it was pretty clever. But Sam's glare was enough to keep him from attempting the same stunt again, and at the end of class he still had only one arrow in his target.

Still, that was enough to keep the coach from using him as a bad example at the end of class when she told all the students what they could improve on. And that was enough for Danny.

"What were you thinking, Danny?" Sam demanded when classes let out for the day and the trio could talk without being overheard.

"What if someone had seen you, or even just suspected?"

"Well, they didn't, did they?" Danny retorted.

"But they could have. Just because no one saw today doesn't mean they won't the next time you try this."

"Sam, please. I'm not planning on doing this again."

She raised one eyebrow at him.

"Okay, maybe once more. Or twice. But I'm not planning on doing this every time!"

"Yeah, well, ever think it might be a good idea for you to actually practice your archery instead of figuring out ways to fake it?" Sam asked.

"Easy for you to say, because you've never had a problem with it," Danny said.

"She's right, man. What if one day you actually need to shoot something and you can't?" Tucker said.

"Come on, guys. I can teleport - "

"Oh, we _sure_ know that," Sam said.

" - so when would I ever need to use a bow and arrow? I can just pop in, use a sword, and pop out," Danny finished.

"Fair enough," Tucker said.

"Still, you shouldn't have done it," Sam said.

"I know, I know. How about this: I promise to never use teleportation to cheat at archery again."

"Or anything else," Sam demanded.

"You're killing me," Danny complained.

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**Hi all! I've been busy with a lot of new projects lately, but some of your reviews have renewed my determination to finish up old fanfics I'm losing interest in.**

**...**

**...**

**No, it's not this one. I've been stalling on this fic because I felt compelled to write a oneshot of Danny explaining recent events to Tucker, or honing his powers, and it wasn't going to be fun to write.**

**But then I remembered, hey, this is a oneshot collection! Following a plotline in order isn't required! **

**So from now on I'll be writing and posting these in the order I'm inspired to write them - the above is a oneshot I wrote a while ago but hadn't posted because I was waiting until I'd written Danny with his powers in some kind of order, and I don't like to post author's notes as their own chapters.**

**That said, you probably won't see much in this for a while still. I'm trying to finish up one of my oldest stories, Sparks Among the Ashes, as well as drawing an original webcomic, running an (albeit not-very-popular) askblog, plotting an original novel, writing a long-chaptered fic I coauthor, and, oh yeah, going through another rigorous semester of college. Time permitting, I'll also begin working on a linear and long Danny Phantom/Hunger Games fic I've been wanting to do for a while and will be posting once the whole thing is done. **

**In the meantime, if you want more Danny Phantom fic, go check out the story Duality (by account DualityAU). I'm a coauthor, and have recently taken over as primary writer a few chapters into Part 2 (we write ahead), and I'm hoping to get it updating again soon. **

**Thanks for reading!**


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